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Real World Windows Azure: Interview with Itzik Spitzen, VP of Research & Development at Gizmox

MSDN: Can you tell us about Gizmox and the Instant CloudMove solution?

Spitzen: Gizmox was founded in 2007 with a vision to bridge the gap between the security, performance and ease of development traditionally provided by client/server desktop applications and the scale, economics and stability provided by the Cloud.

Based on our award-winning Visual WebGui technology we created migration solutions from client/server desktop to Web and the cloud. The Instant CloudMove solution enables the auto-transposition of application code that runs locally as a client/server application into an application that runs natively on Windows Azure as a rich Web application.

MSDN: What is unique about Instant CloudMove?

Spitzen: Visual WebGui CloudMove provides one of the shortest paths for moving client/server applications to Windows Azure. Our tools allow 85-95% of the migration process to be done automatically, which saves organizations from throwing away years of investments in code when looking to move to the cloud.

Once the code is transformed into Visual WebGui, applications can be accessed from mobile devices, tablets and PCs from the same application code, without the need for specific client installations.

MSDN: What are the key benefits of the solution for Windows Azure?

Spitzen: Visual WebGui's unique architecture and protocols are optimized for Windows Azure; our tests indicate savings of about 90% in bandwidth consumption and 50% on Windows Azure compute instances for many scenarios. We provide tools to assess the expected resource consumption of an existing application once it is migrated to Windows Azure to help predict the costs of running in the cloud before making the move.

MSDN: Can all client/server applications be transformed to Windows Azure using this solution?

Spitzen: Basically yes. We have tools for migrating from .NET and VB6 and we are working on automated solutions for migrating from technologies such as Oracle Forms and COBOL. Our solution also includes a free assessment tool, which provides a quick readiness test to Cloud. The tool generates a detailed report that indicates on the level of complexity and as a result the effort that would take to migrate a certain client/server application to the Cloud.

We are currently giving a 25% discount on transposition licensing and services to Windows Azure customers. Learn more about Windows Azure offers here. Learn more about the discounted services we are offering here.

VIDEO: CloudMove Transposition Process in Action

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